The Ascent of Money

Historian Niall Ferguson traces money from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to the credit derivatives that triggered the 2008 crash. He walks through the Medici banking dynasty in Florence, the Rothschilds financing European wars through bond markets, and the Mississippi Company bubble that ruined French finance in the 1720s. Ferguson visits the sites themselves, from Bolivian silver mines that bankrolled the Spanish empire to Chicago trading pits and the wreckage of subprime-lending neighborhoods in the United States, pairing each location with archival documents and interviews with economists and historians. His argument runs against the instinct to treat finance as parasitic: money, credit, and risk-pricing are technologies as consequential as any invention, and their history explains why nations rise, fight wars, and occasionally collapse. The series does not shy from the ugly parts, including the human cost of colonial extraction and the mechanics of the derivatives that nearly froze the global banking system. It closes with the 2008 meltdown treated not as an aberration but as the latest chapter in a five-hundred-year pattern of boom, panic, and reinvention.